Video hub Hulu now lets its members amass friends lists much like a standard social-networking service, the site said Thursday.

You can now invite friends from your e-mail address books or Facebook and MySpace accounts, and then see a feed of what your friends have been watching, commenting on, or subscribing to.

In the event that you find this creepy or don't want your boss to catch on to the fact that you watch reruns of It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia all day long you can disable these activity-feed features.

The announcement comes in conjunction with the one-year anniversary of Hulu's public debut. To mark the occasion, the NBC Universal-News Corp. joint venture will introduce over the next week a "bevy of new shows, more seasons of user favorites, and classic cartoons and movies."

Also new: a sort of trends page with rankings of the most e-mailed, searched, and embedded videos, as well as editors favorites. Not surprisingly, Saturday Night Live is a huge hit, and the most-searched name on the site is "Palin."

On the less pleasant side of things, Hulu's one-year anniversary comes at a time when the site is dealing very publicly with the invariable old media-new media gulf: pressure from content owners caused the site to ax its support for buzzworthy video software maker Boxee earlier this month.

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Caroline McCarthy, a CNET News staff writer, is a downtown Manhattanite happily addicted to social-media tools and restaurant blogs. Her pre-CNET resume includes interning at an IT security firm and brewing cappuccinos.
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